the faithful warrior for
God and man; there was one ideal view of humanity which dominated all
his work; there was one principle which directed all his verse to
celebrate the struggle of humanity towards the perfection for which God,
he believed, had destined it. These things underlie all the poems in
_Ferishtah's Fancies_ and the _Parleyings with Certain People_, and give
to them the uplifted, noble trumpet note with which at times they are
animated. The same temper and principle, the same view of humanity
emerge in that fine lyric which is the Epilogue to _Ferishtah's
Fancies_, and in the Epilogue to _Asolando_.

The first sees a vision of the present and the future in which all the
battle of our life passes into a glorious end; nor does the momentary
doubt that occurs at the close of the poem--that his belief in a divine
conclusion of our strife may only have been caused by his own happiness
in love--really trouble his conviction. That love itself is part of the
power which makes the noble conclusion sure. The certainty of this
conclusion made his courage in the fight unwavering, despair impossible,
joy in battle, duty; and to be "ever a fighter" in the foremost rank the
highest privilege of man.

Then the cloud-rift broadens, spanning earth that's under,
Wide our world displays its worth, man's strife and strife's success:
All the good and beauty, wonder crowning wonder,
Till my heart and soul applaud perfection, nothing less.

And for that reason, because of the perfectness to come, Browning lived
every hour of his life for good and against wrong. He said with justice
of himself, and with justice he brought the ideal aim and the real
effort together:

I looked beyond the world for truth and beauty:
Sought, found, and did my duty.

Nor, almost in the very grasp of death, did this faith fail him. He
kept, in the midst of a fretful, slothful, wailing world, where prophets
like Carlyle and Ruskin were as impatient and bewildered, as lamenting
and despondent, as the decadents they despised, the temper of his
Herakles in _Balaustion_. He left us that temper as his last legacy, and
he could not have left us a better thing. We may hear it in his last
poem, and bind it about our hearts in sorrow and joy, in battle and
peace, in the hour of death and the days of judgment.

At the midnight in the silence of the sleep-time
When you set your fancies free,
Will they pass to wh